Today, passengers travelling in most modern commercial aircraft are able to view the current geographical position of the aircraft, typically in the form of an image of the aircraft or an icon that is superimposed over a geographical map. Additionally, passengers may also be provided an estimated time of arrival (ETA) to the aircraft's destination, as well as the aircraft's current airspeed, altitude, and heading direction. This information may be provided to passengers via cabin displays or individual seatback displays, depending on the particular configuration of the aircraft's on-board entertainment system.
In recent years, major airlines have also begun allowing passengers to access the Internet using their mobile devices or individual seatback displays on certain aircraft equipped with on-board communication systems for communicating with ground-based networks. Using the Internet, a passenger may access public websites that provide estimated travel times for ground-based transportation (such as driving, public transit, private hires, etc.) from a ground-based starting location to a desired destination.
However, the passenger is limited by the information sources used by public websites to generate the estimated travel times and suggested routes for ground-based transportation, which is not based on real-time information and does not take into account aspects of the air travel. In addition, the ground-based estimates will not take into consideration the amount of time it will take to get from the gate once the aircraft has landed at the destination airport to the passenger's desired ground-based transportation. Depending on the airport's physical layout, how much foot traffic the airport is currently experiencing, whether or not the passenger has checked baggage, and whether or not the passenger must first go through customs, among other variables, this could range from a few minutes to an hour or more. As such, any estimated time of arrival will be wholly inaccurate.
There is, therefore, an unmet demand for a multimodal travel estimation and routing system that dynamically provides time estimates and routing information from point-to-destination for multimodal travel based on real-time information.